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Lakhdar Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria and United Nations and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria, is a member of The Elders, a group of independent global leaders working for peace and human rights.

Weren't our allies in the Syrian civil war the same as Al Quaeda and ISIS? Weren't US soldiers and marines protesting this fact with photographs on twitter a couple of years ago? From this lovely first-world vantage point in sunny rural New York, it looks like the origin of the Syria crisis is one of those things that's better off forgotten.

A year ago Lakhdar Brahimi resigned as the UN envoy for Syria after the failure of the Geneva-talks. His deepest regret was his inability to rally for a coherent international support for resolving the "world's worst humanitarian crisis in modern times". Even though he is known as one of the world's most brilliant diplomats, he has to acknowledge that the magnitude of the crisis is too overwhelming, that he called a mission "nearly impossible".
Since his department no successor has been found. What makes mediation so difficult is that the negotiators - Lakhdar Brahimi and Kofi Annan - so far had been torn between serving the UN and the deeply divided Arab League.
As former Arab League under-secretary-general in the 1980s and Algeria's foreign minister in the 1990s, Brahimi helped broker an end to the long-running civil war in Lebanon in 1989, negotiating with Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez.
It's unclear whether Bashar al-Assad is more brutal than his father, who also had ruled Syria with iron grip. The civil war there has turned out to be "beyond humane". The two rounds of talks between the Assad regime and the opposition in Geneva in January and February 2013 yielded no results except for a week-long ceasefire in the partially besieged city of Homs.
At the same time rising tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine diverted the world's focus. With so many hot spots competing for attention, "many people, confronted by such vast suffering, have become numb and apathetic". While world leaders seek to end the war, they refuse to admit that Syria’s social and economic fabric had been torn beyond repair, that it may be unthinkable to call for a national reconciliation and forget these "atrocities on all sides". Under these circumstances they should opt for a Balkan-style breakup of Syria. This is exactly what the Assad regime and regional players like the Iran as well as Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies might contemplate. Geographically Syria has been carved up between the Alawites, Sunnis and Kurds. It will hardly be a reality that Syria be a unitary state again. In order to end the humanitarian crisis, it has to start on political level. Yet world leaders fear the fall of Assad would usher in more chaos and embolden ISIS to expand its territories. It may not be the case, if ISIS were contained properly. It's tragic to see refugees, who have "lost their lives in this perilous crossing" in the Mediterranean.
What is more outrageous are the greed and callousness of human traffickers. Unfortunately, many of us in Europe are too pre-occupied with our own grievances, that we show little "humanity" to others' elsewhere. For them too, it's a matter of survival, although they are much better off than those "crammed into rickety vessels" or in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, having no access to "food, water, and vital services".